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Loading... Agee on Film: Criticism and Comment on the Movies (Modern Library the Movies)by James Agee
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. James Agee was a very good writer with a very good novel "A Death in the Family" to his credit, and three film scripts produced. He is reasonably lauded for his efforts. The USA of his times, the 1940's and 50's did not give him his due and this volume contains his essay on silent film comedies, and the film reviews he wrote for "The Nation" and "Time" magazines. His reviews set a very high standard of readability and sound analysis and are an education for those of us laying down reviews for Library thing. And all of us should read them. My copy is Grosset's universal Library, 1969. ( )
Was Agee’s moviegoing so virtuous, or did he, perhaps, now and then, like the rest of us, enjoy decadent, sleazy, slick commercial pictures? We ought to be able to see a reasonably lousy picture without feeling we’ve been violated. Agee always seemed to feel personally betrayed by synthetic elements in a movie, by “sophistication.” Because Agee was so great a critic, there is a tendency to take over his terms, but his excessive virtue may have been his worst critical vice. Agee’s demands were, in some ways, both impossibly high for the movie medium and peculiarly childlike... I don’t think we would be expected to respond to this sort of thing in literature, but, possibly because of Agee’s influence, we are expected to have very simple tastes when it comes to movies. Yet simple people in simple stories made some of us yawn even as children — which is probably why we started going to the movies. The place for goodness is in life, not on the screen. I realize that Agee used words like “love” and “purity” in order to get away from clever language and professional jargon — that he wanted language as well as movies cleansed — but though movies need cleansing more than ever, we mustn’t throw the whore out with the bath water. Is contained in
Collects reviews of the movie critic who wrote for Time magazine and The Nation during the 1940s. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)791.4309The arts Recreational and performing arts Public performances Film, Radio, and Television Film History, geographic treatment, biographyLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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